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FRONT PORCH STORIES: Summertime memories

When I was growing up, summer on Karen Road in College Park was pretty much the all-American summer.

Back in the 1960s and ’70s, we didn’t have stuff like “interactive” museums for kids. We had summer camp, where you braided cheap plastic strings into dangling things for your mom’s keys. Any kid that was able to smuggle in a transistor radio was the coolest kid at camp – that is, until his nine-volt battery ran out. Then the playing field was leveled and others could vie for top spot by finding a turtle or a perfect stick that could be used as a divining rod.

We didn’t have cell phones, but we didn’t need them. Mom could yell all the way to the end of the street, and we knew it was time to come home. She had volume that carried through wind, rain and probably fierce storms. She pretty much called my brother’s name first, probably because he was the oldest and most likely the farthest from the house. “Daaayyy VID!” She would bellow, emphasis on the “vid.”

The bicycles Dave and I rode were the sports model. Banana seats, high handlebars, and mine even had a basket with a plastic flower on it. I was often designated the pack mule and would carry the baseball and gloves for the boys.

We didn’t have bottled water. If the Georgia sun baked us to near death, we’d simply drag our thirsty selves to someone’s garden hose — yes, the kind made with formaldehyde, arsenic, petroleum and who knows what else — and we’d drink to our heart’s content.

The trick was to run the hose for a minute to get the water out that had been sitting in it. To a group of kids who had spent the last hours peddling bicycles, playing ball, climbing hills, skating, running, jumping and rolling in the grass, the purpose of getting rid of the old water in the hose wasn’t for health purposes. It was simply because it was too hot to drink.

We didn’t have a pool in my suburban neighborhood, but there was this storm drain at the bottom of a hill that we could plug up and, after a week or so, get rain water deep enough to wade in.

Being a street pool, it also had all the stuff that drained out of cars in it, but we didn’t care. Perhaps the cure for anything we may have contracted from the dirty waters that sustained us was hours upon hours of sunshine. We had an endless supply, and we used it religiously.

Sprinklers were our oasis. Almost anyone who dared water their lawn in the summer would see a pile of kids’ bicycles dropped by the curb and a dozen or so of us jumping back and forth into the sprinklers.

They were basic rectangular devices that had a silver metal tube with holes drilled in. The water would shoot out, and the tube would oscillate back and forth, spraying the yard and the neighborhood kids.

We knew which neighbors would run us off and which ones wouldn’t, so it was a great thing when “nice” neighbors watered their lawns on hot summer days.

When we weren’t dancing through sprinklers or riding bicycles, we’d climb trees or do daredevil stunts on skates and skateboards.

Our skates were the kind with keys. You had to attach them to your shoes, fit them “just so” and take off. It was time to fit them again when you turned your ankle. The skateboards were simply wheels stuck to a piece of wood. They didn’t do much more than roll, but the fancier models would turn if you leaned a bit to the left or right. They certainly weren’t like today’s skateboards and didn’t divide in the middle so you could do both at one time; it was old-school skateboarding.

One of my favorite things to do was stomp on a can just right, so it would fit the shape of my shoe, and then drag it on the street while riding my bike. We all did this so we could shoot sparks, making our bicycles and a few old cans into rockets that would propel us into space.

Those summers were great. Back then we didn’t get takeout. We’d come home to a full meal and all the sweet tea or lemonade we could handle. No cell phones, video games, bottled water or fancy toys. But no doubt, we had it all.